Initially, InnFirst.com was built to be a low cost, web based hospitality management platform for vacation rental and B&Bs with up to 20 properties or 20 rooms. However, over the course of the last six months I’ve been working with several property managers and CondoTel owners who have buildings with hundreds of condos that they manage. Like a hotel, each of these “condos” operates very similar to a hotel room, in the sense that when guests book they don’t know which condo they are renting,the actual condo is assigned to the guest after the reservation is made, many times not until the guest actually checks in at the property management office.
The property manager or CondoTel owner is most concerned with maximizing occupancy. To maximize occupancy there are several requirements:
1) Robust and flexible booking logic which assign guests to rooms / condos. At the property manager’s request, the booking logic must be able to shuffle reservations to assure maximum occupancy. Likewise, some repeat guests will probably request specific rooms or units, so those reservations need to have the flexibility to be “fixed” and left out of the shuffle.
Likewise, the application must be smart enough to look at a block of rooms / units and then assign a new reservation to the best unit which results in maximum occupancy.
2) Booking calendar which shows all available dates and units. Most online booking systems ask the guest to enter an arrival date and then the system returns which units are available (if any) for that date. This has always frustrated me, because in most instances I have found the room or property that I want and I am flexible on my arrival date. I simply want to know when it’s available and at what price.
Using traditional multi-unit / multi-room calendars this is not possible. I have to literally go through day by day to see if the property or room I want is available. InnFirst solves all that, by providing a booking calendar that displays all the rooms / units on the left and the calendar on the right.
Take a look:
Utilizing our booking calendar, a property owner or manager won’t lose those guests who are flexible in their dates. In fact, initial results are showing property owners are increasing their booking y 15-25% just by adding an online booking component to their website. I’ll be writing more on these results in a later post.
In summary, if you are a CondoTel property owner or manager, or a property manager managing up to 100 properties in multiple locations, please try out InnFirst.com for the free 30 day trial period. We’ll gladly walk you through the property setup and setup several of your properties for you to get you started.
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